Take Your Stand Against PC Spam

If you’ve had enough spam (unsolicited electronic commercial marketing messages sent in bulk using services such as email messaging as described in New Zealand’s anti-spam laws) you’re not alone. This is a big subject, sowe’ll give you a few ideas to minimise spam in your life. Spam costs us all big time. It’s annoying and time consuming and it increases the chance that we’ll miss or delete a legitimate email. It also adds huge extra cost for service providers – extra bandwidth is needed to cope withtraffic and extra staff are needed to combat spam and deal with spam-affected customers. These costs inevitably end up added to our end- user charges. Spam is big business. Email is one of the most efficient communication methods available but it is misused on a huge scale by spammers. Why? Because it works. Most of us ignore the products on offer, but if a spammer gets even a 0.01 percent response from 10 million emails, that’s 1000sales – successful by any measure. Most spam is sent from overseas on an indiscriminate and massive scale. Here are some ways to keep spammers from adding your address to their lists: * Be aware that harvesting software trawls through public websites looking for email addresses. If possible, don’t post your email address on any public site. Use a link, or type the email address with the word “at” instead of the symbol “@”. * Software is also used to generate email spam that goes tocommon user names at valid domains. If the spam email isn’t bounced back, the address is verified as legitimate. You can bounce emails back by blocking the sender. * If you go to chat rooms, don’t use your usual address. Create one that you can just delete if it attracts too much spam. * Unless you know the sender is safe, don’t click on “unsubscribe” links. Doing this confirms that your email address is active. Instead block the sender and delete the email. * Read a site’s privacy policy before you provide any personal details including your email address – you may find the policygives permission for your details to be passed on to who knows who. * Don’t forward anything that looks like spam, even virus warnings. These could be hoaxes designed simply to harvest addresses. Xtra, Paradise, Vodafone and other ISPs automatically filter outa huge number of spam emails before they reach your inbox. Here are some ways to further control what does get through: * Install software that lets you check emails before they come into your inbox (check out the free software at www.mailwasher.net). * Check you are making the mostof any anti- spam capabilities in your anti-virus software (and of course keep your antivirus, adware, and spyware software up to date as spam can contain harmful attachments). * Set your email program up to automatically filter spam and use blocked senders and safe senderscapabilities for further protection. * Check the anti-spam services available from your ISP. Some such as Slingshot, provide additional personalised spam filtering. Controlling spam takes a multi level approach and dedication to systematically eliminating or blocking spammer’s access to you. Each time you create one of these blocks, congratulations, you’re taking a stand against spam! Ask me anything Techie Log-on to www.needanerd.co.nzand ask me anything techie. * Adam Dunkerley is the general manager of Need A Nerd, a company that offers mobile technical support on all things computer related. Phone 0800 63-33-26.